On Mon, Feb 04, 2002 at 02:00:18PM -0500, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
>
> Ummm, the 5% reservation is to prevent the high levels of
> fragmentation that occur when the filesystem is near full (something
> that I wish Windows would adopt as standard too ;-). It is also to
> keep your system from "hanging" if system/root processes need to
> write to the filesystem, so they aren't at the "mercy" of users
> filling it up. And there are a few other, very important reasons
> too.
Some folks have done some studies of how reseirfs performance degrades
over time on a fully-loaded system. So the reasons for wanting to
reserve 5% for root processes ---- avoidance of fragmentation, wanting
to allow log files to be written by syslog (and other files by root
process) as higher priority that user processes which are overrunning
the filesystem, etc --- probably also apply for resierfs. People just
haven't discovered that it doesn't this feature yet. :-)
But if you want to disable this in ext2, it's easy enough to do so
with a very simple tune2fs command: "tune2fs -m 0 /dev/hdXXX". At
that point, you will lose in exactly the same ways you will lose with
reseirfs with respect to full filesystems. But, if you really badly
need the disk space, then that's a tradeoff you'll have to make.
- Ted